Interview

GO: Also, you were clearly hypersensitive. Richard had three floors in his building so that nobody would be above him and nobody would be below him-so he didn't have to hear anybody walking or playing music.

RP: Yeah, I was very sensitive about noise, which, if you're going to live in New York, is crazy. But I paid so much money for that situation. And then I ended up renting to the strangest people. I rented to the woman who played Laura Palmer on Twin Peaks, Sheryl Lee. But I do remember things about living in New York . . . I remember being at the Odeon one night and going down to that basement and pissing in one of those old toilets up against the wall with the ice. It was called pissing on ice-that was the expression. A really good restaurant pours ice in their toilets, at least on the men's side.

LD: Is that true?

RP: That's the mark of a very upscale restaurant. It's not true anymore but it used to be.

GO: They still have it at P.J. Clarke's, I think.

RP: Apparently, it takes away the ammonia smell of urine. I used to write under the pseudonym of
Fulton Ryder, and I wrote a little essay called "Pissing on Ice" that was published in Real Life magazine.

GO: Hilton Rider?

RP: Fulton Ryder.

GO: Fulton. So how did you get into these Rasta pieces that you're doing now? I know a little bit about it.

RP: That was just from hanging out in Saint Bart's for the last 12 years.

GO: And we all know how many Rastas there are in Saint Bart's . . .

RP: There aren't that many Rastas in Saint Bart's, but I picked up a book on them. It's a very foreign subject for me. And, you know, I just love the mysticism-the kind of religious, musical definition of Rastafarianism. It's a very defined type of culture that I didn't really know much about. But I loved the look, and I loved the dreads, so I just started fooling around with this book, drawing it like I did with the de Kooning paintings. I did some collages. And then I wrote this proposal, which I pitched to Hollywood. It was called Eden Rock. The story was basically about a guy who lands in Saint Bart's, gets off the plane, is immediately told that there's been a nuclear holocaust in the rest of the world, and he looks at his family and says, "We can't go back." So he and his relatives take over a hotel-they take over Eden Rock. Then there are some Rastas on a cruise ship. Three days later, some locals attack the cruise ship and they start throwing people overboard. And these are huge cruise ships down there-like, multi-level cruise ships. But the Rastas escape, and they take over their own hotel, the Manapany. And then there's a lesbian group of girls who escape and they take over their own hotel, the Guanahani. So everybody has their own hotel, and that's where the video game rights come into this pitch. We got a ghostwriter to do the story, and it's being published, and eventually, hopefully, it'll be totally fucked up by Hollywood. But I don't care because it's all under a pseudonym. My name is not attached to it.

GO: Fulton, uh . . . Ryder?

RP: Fulton Ryder is the pseudonym. So anyway, the Rastas and the lesbians started starring in these pictures and were kind of like bands-there are, like, five people to a picture, and every picture has a title to it. It sort of becomes an allegory. It's just something I needed to get out of my system. The pictures are very quickly done-they're not really thought about-and there's a collage element to them that's very primitive. Paste-up, cutting with scissors, and squeegeed on with paint. It's something that I can do myself, and I like that aspect of it. I don't need assistants. I don't need anybody. "James Brown's Disco Ball" is sort of the working title of the whole body of work, although "Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead" is another title that I'm thinking about. And then my contribution to the Rastas was this introduction of the guitar.

GO: Is it always the same guitar or are there different guitars?

RP: No, there are different guitars. I cut out the little section of the guitar and pasted over their midsections, so it's like the new fig leaf.

GO: What about the eyes?

RP: I had done the lozenge eyes for your book of poems a long time ago. I also did a whole portfolio of historical Jesus paintings that I put these lozenges on. And then, of all people, Marc Jacobs was in the studio, and I must have had one of these lozenge faces out, and he says, "What's this? I've never seen this before." He really liked it, so he made some jewelry with it. It sort of got me thinking about them again. The other thing is that a lot of the imagery is black-and-white, so the lozenge is almost like one of those old black bars that they used to put over women's faces in porn magazines if they didn't want to be identified. I like the idea-it's almost like it has this kind of relation to the nurses' mask [in Prince's nurse paintings]. It's a way of making it all the same and getting rid of the personality. It also comes out of the de Kooning paintings. It really morphed out of that because right at the end of working on the de Koonings, I started to use images of black women with a black-and-white process. I liked the skin tone that came out of the ink-jet process-it was just something accidental.

GO: Why did you get sick of doing the de Kooning paintings? It seemed like you did more nurse paintings than de Koonings.

RP: Yeah, I did do more nurses, but with the de Koonings, I'd just done it. I didn't like the idea that, in the end, I had to pay attention to someone else's work. And I wanted to get rid of the color. So the thing is that, you know, two years of doing the de Koonings was enough. It was enough of my attention. The Rastas came really fast. And they're going to be over really fast, too.

GO: The last time I was at your house on Long Island, you had this Velvet Underground painting up. And then I saw it on an auction link right after that.

RP: That's because it was donated to the red auction. I still occasionally do a Velvet Underground painting. I've done a Sonic Youth painting and two of The Band. Those are the three bands that I've done.

GO: I was listening to Sirius Satellite Radio the other day and "When I Paint My Masterpiece" came on. What a great song that is! The Band and Bob Dylan. Dylan wrote it. The Band covered it. Then Dylan and The Band did it together.

RP: The Band had great songs. They had great album covers, too. I remember the second album [The Band, 1969] that came out with them standing in the field, sepia-toned. They looked like they were out of that McCabe & Mrs. Miller [1971] western with Warren Beatty. It was a very simple cover, just them staring at the camera. You really couldn't tell who was who.

GO: Did you ever go up to Woodstock when they were living up there and hanging out?

RP: We go down to Woodstock like once every two months. It's pretty near where we live. I've always wanted to go back to the field where the original festival took place in Bethel [New York], Max Yasgur's farm. Apparently they have a marker there now and it's a public space. I always wanted to go back there. I wanted to go back to that field and take a photograph of it. The same place where I took my one photograph of Woodstock.

GO: With the one frame that you had left in your camera.

RP: You don't believe that, do you?

GO: After all these years, there are a couple of things that I'm still not quite sure about.